hancock & kelly
Notes from Performing the Archive: Jackie Kennedy Flees the Scene of Her Husband’s Murder

March 2019 Residency and Performance

Work-in-progress performance March 23, 2019 // 7 PM at 6018North

Premiere March 29-30 // 7 PM and March 31 // 2 PM at Chicago Cultural Center

6018North is proud to host hancock & kelly as part of the IN>TIME 19 performance festival, an in-progress residency of local and international performers responding to the work of Goat Island. In residency at 6018North for the month of March, hancock & kelly draw from Goat Island’s first performance, Soldier, Child, Tortured Man (1987) to create their new work Notes from Performing the Archive: Jackie Kennedy Flees the Scene of Her Husband’s Murder.

hancock & kelly is the collaborative project of artists Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly. Since 2001, they have collaborated on a series of works questioning and provoking the gaps between subjects. Through an internationally acclaimed body of work spanning performance, choreography, video, photography, installation, and text, they continually ask questions of where the limits of the body may be drawn, and separated from the knowledge and questions with which they are enmeshed. Throughout hancock & kelly’s work, issues of materiality, value, and embodied knowledge have been pivotal to the complex critical and aesthetic dialogues they undertake. Their practice moves fluidly between ‘live’ and ‘object-based’ work, and the resulting pieces have been a series of visceral and queer encounters, both moving and spectacular.

Unearthing an architecture of athleticism, spectacle and domination, the original Goat Island work Soldier, Child, Tortured Man explores the militarization of daily living on an individual and societal level. hancock & kelly’s research-in-response investigates power structures and points of resistance in relation to gender, toxic masculinity, complicity, and what they consider the white liberal project of cultural guardianship, based on dubious positions of wealth and entitlement.

Based in Germany, hancock and kelly are one of nine national and international performance groups and artists commissioned to develop and present new work, each inspired by one of Goat Island’s original nine performances. Works-in-progress are presented throughout Chicago as part of the IN>TIME Festival, with the final world-premieres at the Chicago Cultural Center.

In keeping with Goat Island’s re-iterative use of materials, the exhibition’s performance space has been created by Goat Island member Bryan Saner as a re-imagining of the space within the church gymnasium where the collective rehearsed. To create the performance floor Saner repurposed materials, including leftover wood from the Chapuisat Brothers’ In Wood We Trust, which he co-built at 6018North.

This space, in the Sidney R. Yates Gallery, and its activations open February 2–June 23. In the adjacent galleries in the 4th floor Exhibition Hall, the exhibition, goat island archive–we have discovered the performance by making it opens March 30–June 23. A tenth performance created from fragments of the nine new responses will be presented in June during a week of concluding events.

Throughout its 22 years, Goat Island’s global reach connected local and international artists in a generative spirit. The IN>TIME 19 residency and Cultural Center exhibition extends these global conversations and creates an innovative, performative format where hancock & kelly can revisit the Goat Island archive as a living entity through the process of rehearsing, researching, and performing at 6018North and the Cultural Center.

About 6018North
6018North is an Illinois not-for-profit corporation dedicated to the promotion of culture and the arts in Chicago. 6018North projects are partially supported by 3Arts, the AD3 Innovation Bootcamp Grant, a CityArts Innovation Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, the Gen Ops Plus Grant from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the Field Foundation of Illinois, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, the Illinois Arts Council Youth Employment Grant, the Joyce Foundation, the MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at the Driehaus Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and individual donations. For more information please visit us online at 6018NORTH.ORG

For more information, please visit: in-time-performance.org // hancockandkelly.com // chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/provdrs/attractions_eventsandexhibitions/news/2019/january/goat_island

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: 6018NORTH, Chicago, Edgewater, hancock & kelly, Notes from Performing the Archive: Jackie Kennedy Flees the Scene of Her Husband’s Murder